Call for Papers

Symposium, 4-5 April 2019Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University, NYC

In her path-breaking work Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), Gloria E. Anzaldúa parsed out the relationship between heteronormativity and the stretching of the border into various borderlands, subjectivities, and temporalities. In the context of growing migration and the accompanying intensification of border regimes, this formative thesis on the relationship between borders and sexuality needs renewed attention and consideration. How do sexuality and borders intersect? What role does sexuality play in the production, maintenance and disruption of contemporary border regimes? How do borders as features of racial capitalism multiply inequalities via sexuality and, conversely, how is sexuality mediated through racialized border regimes? While people continue to move across borders, sexuality becomes a dominant frame through which such movement is attempted to be captured, framed, and contained. At the same time, the border becomes understood, organized, and contested through sexuality and sexual discourse.

In response to these phenomena, this symposium conceptualizes sexuality as a method of bordering and thinks sexuality beyond identity towards its multifarious entanglements with contemporary border regimes. From sexual panics about migrant sexuality, the pornotropic gaze of surveillance technologies, to media discourses about reproduction and contagion, sexuality can be said to play a key role in how borders are policed and managed. At the same time, intimacy, desire, and sexuality have become rallying points in challenging borders as seen in queer activism against deportations, critiques of homonationalism and imaginations of different sexual futures and political horizons. Bringing together scholars from a variety of disciplinary and regional contexts, this symposium aims to show how sexuality matters for the study of and struggles around borders.

Topics include but are not limited to:

Intimacy of border control, touch, and the haptic

Sexual transmission, deviancy, and national health

Family, state and, national reproduction

Sexual panics and the intensification of border regimes

Trans perspectives on gendered and sexualised border regimes

Sexual violence, detention, and state violence

Sex work, discourses of trafficking, and migrant sex work activism

Digital borders, pornography, mediation

Homonationalism(s)

Technologies of border control and sexuality

Surveillance, voyeurism, pornotropics

Entanglement of anti-migrant and anti-queer/feminist politics

Virality, sexuality, and contagion across borders

Queer of colour critique and critical migration studies

Affect, desire, and queer/no border futurities

Biopolitical borders, demography, and population

Queer temporalities, archives, and histories of migration

LGBTQ refugees and migrants

Queer and feminist activism around/against borders

Sexuality and Borders is a two day symposium hosted and funded by New York University’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. It is co-sponsored by NYU’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the DFG-funded research training group “Minor Cosmopolitanisms” (University of Potsdam, Germany) and is supported by LSE’s Department of Gender Studies.

Confirmed Keynotes:

Radha Hegde (Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU)

Miriam Ticktin (Associate Professor of Anthropology, New School for Social Research)

Please send proposals for papers (no longer than 350 words) and a short bio (150 words) by November 1st, 2018 to sexualityandborders@tutanota.com. As an interdisciplinary symposium, we encourage applications that engage a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches and focus on different geopolitical contexts. We aim to enable discussions across academic, artistic and activist debates and also welcome applications from participants outside the academy.